1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to a print server, a printing system, and a computer program product.
2. Description of the Related Art
Some types of conventional image forming apparatuses rasterize to-be-printed data, which is written in a page description language (PDL), and perform raster-data-based printing.
A printing system including a print server and an image forming apparatus is also known. There is also known a technique related to such a printing system, according to which a print server rasterizes PDL data to obtain raster data, and transmits the raster data to an image forming apparatus.
For example, Japanese Patent Application Laid-open No. 2011-257799 discloses a technique for a system including a print server and an image forming apparatus. According to this technique, a task of performing raster image processing is selectively assigned to one of the print server and the image forming apparatus so as to reduce time until completion of image printing by the image forming apparatus.
However, printers (image forming apparatuses), particularly wide-format printers for forming an image on a wide-format (large-format) recording medium, generally form an image from data of various file formats, such as a file format for drawings. Accordingly, a situation that an image forming apparatus cannot perform printing because the apparatus lacks capability of processing to-be-printed data has occurred in some cases depending on a file format of the to-be-printed data and/or specifications of the printer.
In view of the problem described above, there are needs for a print server, a printing system, and a computer program product capable of performing printing reliably.